Earnhardt blows engine, damages Chase hopes

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- Dale Earnhardt Jr. saw his hopes of qualifying for the Chase for the Nextel Cup take a blow Sunday when, for the fourth time this season, an engine failure in the Centurion Boats at The Glen sent him to the garage early.

But neither Earnhardt nor his Dale Earnhardt Inc. organization is showing any sign of giving up, despite finishing 42nd Sunday and falling another position in the standings.

Earnhardt dropped from 13th in the standings to 14th, 100 points behind Kurt Busch, who finished 11th.

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"It won't be easy, but we've done a whole lot harder stuff than that," Earnhardt said. "I can handle it. We'll just come back and try again. I'm going to make sure that I show my confidence in my team and make sure that I show them that I'm not giving up -- and they'll follow suit.

"They'll show me a thing or two [and] we'll get something out of this."

After a track vehicle pushed his No. 8 Chevrolet to the garage, Junior took full blame. He said a number of engine over-revs through the weekend had done him in.

"I think it was due to some of the downshifts I was doing during practice -- we just beat on the motor too hard," Earnhardt said. "I think we was just too rough on it. The motor was good [and] the car was really, really good."

DEI's director of motorsports Richie Gilmore -- the organization's former head engine builder -- said Earnhardt's day was doomed by a valve train failure in his car's Chevy SB2 engine, which was not from the new DEI/Richard Childress Racing engine program.

"That was still a DEI combination," Gilmore said. "But it doesn't matter whose combination it is, if you turn 10,000 RPMs four or five times in practice Saturday and then you do it in the race, you're not going to finish the race.

"That's what Junior was talking about when he apologized to the team. It broke a valve spring and I don't think there's any valve spring in the world that would hold up to that."

Earnhardt said he had no gross over-revs in the race, but he knew his role.

"We didn't turn anything over 10,000 during the race, but during practice all weekend, I was having trouble with the car and struggling -- I was using the downshift to slow the car down and get some speed out of the thing," he said.

"We might have beat on the motor too hard this weekend, but [our engines] have been really good this year. We have had a lot of gremlins, but as far as failure in parts -- rods and things like that -- we haven't had them."

Earnhardt suffered engine failures earlier this season at California, Texas and Indianapolis.

"It's very unfortunate, because everybody looks at it as two engine failures in three weeks, and unfortunately it's circumstances that are out of our control," Gilmore said. "California, we broke a [valve] spring and here we broke a spring, and Indy, we broke a part, the front mandrill. (Continued)